The Role of Space and Place in Organizational and Institutional Change: A Systematic Review of the Literature

We present a systematic review of empirical articles investigating the role of place and space within the organizational and institutional change literature. In taking stock of the change literature, our aim is to better understand the nature and degree of scholarly engagement with concepts associated with place and space to inform a future research agenda. Our systematic review identified 290 empirical articles published between 1979 and 2020 that attended to organizational or institutional change and also engaged with space or place. Our analysis generated four archetypal perspectives that represent qualitatively different ways of viewing the role of place and space in how organizations and institutions change: functional perspective, situated perspective, experiential perspective, and mutually constituted perspective. We synthesize the four perspectives into a typology that reveals different levels of attention to change as process and to place and space as lived or physical phenomena, and cast light on different assumptions about the relationships between change and place or space that can guide future research.